Reality television's Piers Morgan last night confronted his toughest underdog challenger since Susan Boyle first opened her mouth on Britain's Got Talent. Yes, Gordon Brown was also dreaming a dream: one in which he wins the next election.

Was the interview – broadcast for Piers Morgan's Life Stories on ITV – a disaster? No. Was it a game-changer? Probably not. Even when he looks and sounds relaxed, giggly even, Brown finds it hard to connect emotionally. He revealed little about Tony Blair ("There were disagreements") or what Morgan called his "Mick Jagger-esque" student days ("I've never touched cannabis"). More Jedward than Susan Boyle. Even Morgan's playful attempt to make the then-chancellor's proposal to Sarah Macaulay "on a wild Scottish beach" in 2000 sound like "Darcy stuff" (did he mean the brooding Heathcliff?) came across like something from the Downing Street news grid. The weather wasn't great. They held hands. He said "I want to get married soon and we should get married soon, please." She said yes, "thankfully". He felt "great". But to avoid media leaks he had the ring sent from America.

Thanks to wall-to-wall 24/7 publicity every YouTube viewer and newspaper reader, every Chinese blogger and Inuit Tweeter, already knew that the prime minister was set to get a little tearful about his daughter, Jennifer Jane, who died at just 10 days eight years ago. Who wouldn't weep to remember such a loss, even when locked in a darkened studio with Piers Morgan? Here is a man who can make Jonathan Ross sound fastidious and once manoeuvred a hapless Nick Clegg into boasting about the "not more than 30" women with whom he had slept.

Never mind, there is an election to be won, and Brown's handlers had persuaded him to try to impress voters by showing more of his elusive "human side" – being less like "a kind of robot figure from ­Thunderbirds", as Morgan helpfully put it the other day.

Was it a cynical U-turn by a man who once decried personalised politics and Blairish exploitation of family? Yes, shouted an army of cynical pundits and bloggers. David Cameron clearly thought so too, because he let it be known he would not be giving a similar interview. But there the Tory leader was on Scottish TV at the weekend welling up over the loss of his own son, Ivan. Voters who complain that politicians all sound the same nowadays sometimes have a point.

Brown's interview took place before a live studio audience on a quiz show set. Like Morgan the audience sounded respectful, sycophantic even, though Sarah Brown's ­sympathetic presence – the camera cutting to her at key emotional moments – may have inhibited potential catcalls. She seemed to be willing him on, but Britain's Got Talent it wasn't. Morgan was never the kind of red-top editor who took a keen interest in poverty data or the proportion of his readers getting to university; moves which might have damaged his career. So the bulk of the questions were designed to draw out the hermit crab of No 10. He likes the Beatles (that Arctic Monkeys story was a joke), Bono and U2. He and Sarah want to do charity work, not make money when he retires.

But mostly it was hard work. Thus, Morgan: "Jeremy Clarkson called you a one-eyed Scottish idiot." Brown: "Yeah, well. Jeremy Clarkson is a Conservative." Morgan: " Come on, you've been grumpy." Brown: "Yeah, but I'm not, I don't sort of behave like that." Morgan: "Were you a big [student] boozer then?" Brown: "Drank a bit, yeah." Thank you prime minister, for being so frank.

In an ideal world, earnest prime ministers shouldn't have to grin and do this sort of thing. Yet for a man who has suffered near blindness, lost a child and fathered another child with cystic fibrosis, Brown should be easier to warm to. Voters may feel sorry for him, but in the wrong way – in the way they did for Susan Boyle, before that voice rang out.